Every year around 4,000,000 pounds of plastic pipette tips, after a single use, are disposed of in landfills globally, leading to significant environmental pollution and costs. A typical laboratory consumes several thousand pipette tips daily for samples and assay procedures. Due to the lack of options for cleaning plastic consumables, the labs discard pipette tips after each use. Such high consumption of plastic tips adds $25,000-$1.5M to the annual operation cost to each of the approximately 14,000 research laboratories in the US.
Devices that are capable of efficient pipette tip cleaning and sterilization could save businesses substantial amounts of money in their scientific operations and drastically reduce the amount of waste produced in the course of operations. Few devices have been developed for this purpose to date. In some cases, laboratories have developed small-scale cleaning methods to reuse a few pipette tips, such as single 96-tip cases. In some small-scale automatic liquid handling instruments, there are setups for the cleaning of tips with solutions. Neither of these options, however, is large enough in scale to be useful in a large industrial, government, or academic laboratory that may use hundreds of pipette tips every day. Additionally, labs must have absolute confidence that a cleaning system has completely removed all contaminants from the pipette tips so that there is no carryover, a term for the contamination presented into an experiment by equipment used in a prior experiment.
Thus, there is a need for a large-scale and economical method for the comprehensive cleaning and sterilization